If you were a castaway on a desert island, what record would you wish to have with you?
I have thought out this scenario oftentimes, and the records kept changing for the first twenty years of my life. My answers regarding choices, genres, and musicians have been more stable in the last decade. Fela Kuti. Cardinal Jim Rex Lawson. King Sunny Ade. All Nigerian musicians. Afrobeat. Highlife. Juju. All West African genres. The oldest genre here is about 100 years in the making, if colonial anthropology is to be reckoned with, but that is another story.
These musicians have had extraordinary careers. Rex Lawson, highlife’s high priest and one-time Fela nemesis, died en route to a concert in Mid-Western Nigeria around the eve of relaunching his musical career post-Biafran war. Fela’s triumph looms larger; a robust discography that I often reduce to one ethereal tune, Power Show. An entire genre of his own making, if we neglect OJ Ekemode’s minority report. A slew of sons and comrades. Fela’s social activism did not interfere with his musical genius; it enhanced it! Little wonder his music continues to flourish decades after his passing.
Then King Sunny Ade. The only living musician of this troika. I grew up listening to Sunny Ade. Born smack in the middle of the third cycle of his greatness, my father would drive me to birthday parties on Saturdays, playing Sunny in the car. I will end up hearing those same songs at the parties. Who did not care for his gorgeous record, Surprise? As kids, we would sing about the risqué femme fatale legend 9ice revisited on Pamurogo off his smashing sophomore album, Gongo Aso. Those deep pockets of sexual metaphors and innuendoes were not accessible to us, but we could mobilise the effervescence, that sheer joy so childlike. Little did we know that we were witnessing the swan song of juju music.
Juju music, a 100-year-old variant of palm wine highlife, may no longer be trendy today, but in the 70s, there was hardly a party in southwest Nigeria that was complete without a juju ensemble playing low-tempo simmering praise songs. Wealthy and upwardly mobile Yoruba elites particularly favoured this mild-mannered, commemorative music. Their favourite stars were Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey. Both charismatic guitarists/bandleaders, Obey was older by five years. Blessed with a bold tenor and a fine hand for writing songs, he was more conservative than his irreverent younger colleague, Sunny Ade, a prince of the Ondo Kingdom, who boldly experimented with the form.
Although modern juju music pivoted to pop dominance in southwest Nigeria in the 70s, its humble journey began in the interiors of Lagos Island, in the company of working-class men moonlighting as musicians. The genre evolved from the cool ambience of nocturnal company, perhaps the African equivalence of Caribbean limning. Modern Juju’s unsung heroes include Ambrose Campbell (who migrated to London from Lagos in the 1940s), Tunde Nightingale (born in Lagos Island but practised primarily in Ibadan, IK Dairo (decorated with an OBE for his contribution to music) and Ayinde Bakare (who died mysteriously on murderous suspicions). These were prominent masters whose distinct styles inspired Ade and his peers.
Sunny Ade’s journey began with the snare drum at the age of 8 in Osogbo, where he learnt boxing under the tutelage of Orlando Owoh, who would also become a highlife/juju legend. He joined the inconsequential semi-pro band of Sunday Ariyo, ported after one year to Idowu Owoeye’s band who performed at the coronation of the Alake of Egbaland in Abeokuta circa 1963. Owoeye abandoned his band in Abeokuta, and a young Sunny was stranded for three months, playing small gigs to raise travel fees to return home.
In 1962, he joined the semi-pro highlife band of Dr Moses Olaiya and the Federal Rhythm Dandies. At the time, IK Dairo was the colossus of juju music. Undeterred by the clarity of his singular vision and armed with a tinny tenor, Sunny Ade recorded his first song in 1970. It sold only thirteen copies.
His sophomore release, Challenge Cup, fared better. It sold 500,000 copies and made him a superstar who drew a comparison to Obey Commander, whose Board Members record released in 1972 is one of the finest juju albums released. The 70s saw a massive explosion in Juju’s popularity, partly due to the relocation of highlife musicians following the Biafran war but mostly a consequence of the newfound affluence of Yoruba elites following the oil boom.
Sunny Ade, pitched somewhere between Tunde Nightingale’s tessitura voice and IK Dairo’s soulful mood, belted album after album through the 70s. He was crowned a king of music (a chieftaincy title) by the paramount ruler of the Oyo Kingdom. Legend is that his music caught the attention of French producer Martin Meissonier in a taxi in Lagos in the late 70s. Meissonier was scouting for the next big thing in music from Africa. He had his eureka moment in the humid taxi, hearing the wail of the steel pedal guitar.
Sunny Ade inked a record deal with Island Records in the early 80s. He released three albums: Juju Music, Synchro System, and Aura. At this time, Juju music was losing its fan base to its closest competition, Fuji, which found massive patronage with the working class. Fuji’s innovator and leading act, Ayinde Barrister, was a one-time Sunny Ade’s Fan Club president.
While the fan base floundered back home, Ade toured America with a 20-man strong band and appeared in a musical cameo on the Hollywood film, O.C. & Stiggs. His bold experimentation with the sound went into geometric proportions. Warm steel pedal guitars, synthesizers, and digital drums were co-opted into a never-ending matrix of refinement. Aura, his third and final album with Island Records, featured Stevie Wonder and Manu Dibango, yet failed to chart on the Billboard. Ade and his producer Martin Meissonier had taken the Juju sound to the precipice of experimentation, but this was the least of Ade’s problems. His Africa Beats band staged a “mutiny” while on tour because of welfare issues, and on their return to Nigeria, they were disbanded.
Ade did not relent. He formed a new band, The Golden Mercury of Africa (GMA), resident in his Ariya nightclub in Yaba. They released albums through the mid-80s at the rate of about two albums per year. King Sunny Ade and the Golden Mercury of Africa released two albums in 1986. Although the exact release dates are unknown, Bamidele Adebayo noted in his book, KSA: Melodies of Wisdom (University Press PLC, 2016), that My Dear was released to commemorate his 40th birth anniversary in September 1986. Sweet Banana was probably released later in the year to coincide with the Christmas celebrations.
A banana is a long-curved fruit that grows in clusters and has soft pulpy flesh and yellow skin when ripe. It is a regular fixture in contemporary West African music, a ready metaphor for risqué sexual suggestions. It is dutifully censored in present-day Nigerian airwaves by the Nigeria Broadcasting Commission (NBC). But NBC did not exist in 1986 when Sunny Ade released his LP, Sweet Banana.
The cover art is not remarkable. Ade’s portrait is silhouetted into a heart shape, with a splash of rainbow colours (not quite a nod to LGBTQIA) at the edge of the front cover. On the back cover, Ade, about 40 years old at the time, is dressed in elegant white trousers and a matching shirt. He is smiling, sitting on a barstool showing off white shoes.
On his earlier LP Afai Bawon Ja released in the 70s, there is a three-minute-long tune, Wa Wo Yan, which roughly means “come and ogle breasts”. A playful and subversive take on a Christian hymn, Ade and his African Beats band enthusiastically invite listeners to come and ogle the breasts of adelebo (which translates historically to mean married women and, more recently, single mothers) doing laundry.
The laundromat in a traditional Yoruba setting was the stream. Far-flung from the village square, it was the perfect rendezvous for lovers and, in Ade’s reckoning, the perfect place to ogle breasts and buttocks – two obsessions of modern Yoruba dance bequeathed directly from juju to afrobeats. Little wonder, the song ends with a delightful talking-drum-enhanced booty-grind campaign. This kind of risqué talk was hardly the preserve of the rather conservative juju music of the time. Romance was not entirely absent from juju; it was neatly dressed in metaphors like Ade would conform to after that playful blooper for at least a decade. But on that hypnotic and soothing Sweet Banana LP, Ade, now in his 40s, threw caution to the winds and chose seduction.
My Dear, the earlier record released in the same year as Sweet Banana is a reconciliatory epistolary love song. It addresses the eponymous, my dear, in question. There has been a tiff, tempers have flared, but the lover surrenders to the persuasion of dialogue. In his mind, there is a reward. Ere Ife. Lovemaking.
Sunny Ade sermonises about lovemaking, each point punctuated with musical apostrophes. Lovemaking is good. Lovemaking is sweet. Lovemaking brings forth children. On this record, Sunny Ade is pushing the boundaries of conservatism, but on Sweet Banana, he lets himself lose all restraints.
Sweet Banana opens with drums and a double entendre on Sunny Loni Ariya. Perhaps one of the most delightful openings in juju, opening on talking drums portrays remarkable confidence. If the 70s were for guitar solos running amok, the 80s saw the talking drum helm the juju ensemble as a pacemaker.
Ariya is the Yoruba word for mirth, to be merry. The mischief is that Sunny Ade also owns a nightclub called Ariya. This double entendre passes the baton to another double entendre announced by guitar riffs. Ade boldly walks into the realms of sexuality. In the eponymous song, Ade calls, “What do you disaya/What do you have under?” His backing vocalists respond with sweet banana, sweet, sweet, sweet banana. Disaya roughly means pectoral burden, breasts. A homonym is suggested to speakers of King’s English. Desire. Further into the solemn and sensual tune, Ade references radio dials and frequencies in an elaborate metaphorical mismatch. It is all happening in Ariya. Sweet Chi, a black angel, has caught the eye of a gentleman whose gentility beguiles his sexual prowess. The song extends into a medley that spreads to the dance floor at Ariya Nightclub. Sunny Ade has relocated his risqué vision from streams to a royal banquet. He is the king, and he is singing. He is at the height of his powers, and he knows it. You can tell this from the tempo of this song. It is unassuming and deliberately mid-tempo, punctuated by a hypnotic Linn drum teaser. There are delightful guitar solos, including the occasional Hawaiian guitar. It is the perfect alchemy; little wonder a fan once tweeted, “The music inside King Sunny Ade’s Sweet Banana was not done by human beings. You can’t tell me anything.”
They are right.
Sex sells. But sex also subverts important issues into footnotes.
Dami Ajayi is an award-winning poet and author of three volumes of poetry. He lives in London.
